


when an old friend pays a visit

by fruitbattery



Category: Rusty Quill Gaming (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Gore, Hurt No Comfort, Implied Child Murder, Nightmares, seriously this is dark and i just had to get it out of my head, tw: immolation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-03
Updated: 2020-04-03
Packaged: 2021-03-01 04:22:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,633
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23465353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fruitbattery/pseuds/fruitbattery
Summary: Sasha had thought she was doing better. That she was healing.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 17





	when an old friend pays a visit

**Author's Note:**

> Please mind the tags!

Sasha’s bed is cool and comforting, like most nights, but she can’t seem to sleep. The breeze through the glassless window is cool, signaling the first strains of autumn and soon, the harvest. By the angle of the moonlight, sunrise isn’t far off, and she’s just resigning herself to an incredibly tired day when she feels a weight in the bed behind her.

“Wha…”

Turning over, heart suddenly pounding, Sasha comes face to face with a child, maybe 10 or 11. She reaches out to comfort him, assuming it’s one of the farm’s kids, but then she freezes. The hair is too familiar, as are the eyes, yeah, but what’s really getting her is the gaping hole that is the top of his head. Blood wells out of it and pours down his face, a river of crimson staining her bedsheets, and as Sasha manages to scramble to her feet on the other side of the bed, she manages to catch a glimpse of what’s inside.

It’s empty, hollow, all the way down to his neck, and blood is pouring from the ends of where  _ things _ should be, some sort of internal structure carved away and gaping. Sasha screams and goes for one of her knives, the one strapped to her calf, but as she pulls at it she screams even louder– it’s fused to her leg, now,  _ in  _ her in the most horrifying way, and she gives up and backs against the opposite wall.

“Brock– what’re you doin’ here– I– you should be dead, Brock, what’s this– talk to me!”

The thing that used to be Brock just looks at her, kneeling on her bed, still somehow breathing. Its voice is a raspy gurgle, but still perfectly audible, and sounding just like a small child in pain. “Sasha– please help me, it hurts, Sasha, they took my brain! They took my brain and I’m all alone, Sasha, I’m just a body now. Please, please help…”

She thinks he’s crying, but it’s hard to tell through the river of gore. “I’m sorry mate, I can’t help you, Brock, please, go away! You’re dead! You’re dead, and Mr. Ceiling threw you at me once, and it didn’t work, so you can’t be here… please.” Images come unbidden to her mind: Brock as she knew him, asleep in bed or playing chase on the streets or stealing fish from a vendor, and then he’s swarmed with masked thugs and dragged off, or they pull out swords and cut his brain out right there in the market stall….

She doesn’t realize she’s crying until he speaks again. “Please, Sasha, it hurts– I’m getting chewed up, it’s too sharp…” His voice is changing, now, morphing slowly into the robotic tones of Mr. Ceiling, but through it all his plaintive little-boy voice remains. “I can’t think in here, I can’t run–” he’s starting to sob in earnest now– “it hurts, Sasha, please….”

She can barely see him through her tears, now, sobbing from fear as much as from pain, but she does the only thing she can think of for him. She opens her arms and steps forward. (He’d always been the huggy one, and she’d oblige. Only for him.)

The figure shuffles forward on his knees, slowly, painfully, movements becoming jerkier as he cries out with every shift of a limb. “It  _ hurts… _ ”

His voice is now almost completely Mr. Ceiling, now, and so when Sasha reaches the bed she’s not surprised when Not-Brock lunges for her, all pretense of pain forgotten. Even foggy with sleep and tears, she dodges to the side easily, and hears a wet thump as whatever-it-is hits the opposite wall. She whips around, still knifeless but prepared to punch, scratch, kick, whatever she needs to do, but it’s not Brock anymore.

Instead, Hamid is lying on her floor, head intact but screaming as instead his arm lies limp and crushed at his side. Ignoring as best she can the joy that spikes violently through her at seeing him again, she drops to her knees beside him.

“You’re not Hamid.”

She’s sure of that now, that whatever is happening to her, it’s not her friends, but that won’t stop her from trying to help them. She tears a sheet off the bed, tearing it into strips, and moving to bandage Hamid’s arm with it.

He flinches away, and platitudes of “Don’t worry, mate” and “I’m only trying to help” die on her lips as his now-clawed good arm swings for her face. She jumps back, but as the blood seeps out of his useless arm, she sees the familiar scales spreading over his body, and he  _ growls, _ pain apparently forgotten. He doesn’t get far off the ground, though, kicking and struggling on his back, before his mouth and nose and ears and eyes all start to glow.

Fake Hamid’s hands turn back into hands immediately, and he clutches at her shirt with surprising force, speaking in parched and raspy tones. “Sasha! Help, help, it burns…”

Up close, she can feel the heat emanating from every part of him, threatening to scorch her flesh, but all she can do is cradle him as he screams, claws flickering in and out of existence, voice and growls alternately bubbling to the surface, pleading for help with the burning. “I’m sorry, Hamid, I don’t know what I can do for you… I’m sorry I can’t save you.” She sits and watches her tears fall, foolishly hoping they’ll quench his fire, but they evaporate before even touching him. She watches black spots appear on his skin as if from the inside, liquid fat bursting out of his torn arm and running down in rivulets as her oldest friend burns to ash.

When Hamid finally stops screaming, he’s been reduced to a blackened husk.

Sasha picks up a pinch of it in her hand, and holds it to her heart, and sobs bitterly over her lost friends for she doesn’t know how long. A wind comes, seemingly from nowhere, and begins to blow away the fragile shell of a tiny halfling, and she doesn’t care where it’s taking him.

Until, of course, she hears a muffled scream from behind her and whips around.

There is something under her mattress. She can’t quite see what, but it’s big, bigger than she is, and the crudely straw-stuffed sleeping pad is bulging and shifting in the middle.

It takes her a too-short amount of time to recognize Azu’s terrified yelling.

Sasha springs to her feet and leaps to the bedside, grabbing the mattress and pulling up, up, up with all her might, but it doesn’t budge. She watches it constrict tighter and tighter around the tall form of an orc paladin, only her arm sticking out. Sasha hold Azu’s hand and sits on the floor, helpless to soothe her friend’s blind panic and powerful thrashing as the mattress constricts tighter and tighter over her face.

With no preamble, Azu’s hand sprouts teeth and bites her, and Sasha isn’t even surprised anymore. She looks up, and there’s Brutor on the bed, still shaped like a dog, half of his face smashed in, attempting to bite her hand off. The muscles needed to operate his jaw properly have been snapped, though, torn tendons and muscles balling up in the sides of his mutilated face. Sasha just sits and lets him slobber on her, too exhausted to cry anymore.

When the essence of what makes Brutor Brutor starts to dissolve, skin loosening and flesh melting into a big gorey puddle on her bed, Sasha just lies down on the floor and stares at the ceiling.

“You know, Sasha, I really miss my legs. Couldn’t you have been a little gentler. pulling me out?”

Oh, no. Sasha looks over to her right, and there’s Zolf, leaning up against the bed, blood leaking not gushing, for once from his leg stumps.

“Oh, screw off, dream Zolf.”

“Bold words coming from someone who only ever kept me around because I kept her from dying once or twice.”

And she knows it isn’t true, that Zolf would never say any of that, but the last time she saw him, he was walking out of a brewery in Prague, completely disillusioned with himself and the world. She couldn’t help him there either. She couldn’t help any of them, if she’s being honest with herself– she abandoned Brock, she never stopped Bertie from abusing that poor fucking dog, and she was helpless against Azu’s crisis of faith in Rome. And oh, Rome, Grizzop–

_ Grizzop– _

She looks up and there he is, bloodied and full of holes and a foot from her face.

“Bet you’re a lot more grateful for me now, eh?”

“What–”

“Bet you’re not all contrite and ‘ohhh, he shouldn’t have sacrificed himself for me’ now! Bet you’re reeeeal glad for all these extra years now, huh?”

“Grizzop, I–”

“Don’t apologize. You’re not worth it. I should never have–”

She screams and lunges for him, and whatever fucked-up dream fugue this is won’t let him hurt her, not really, and soon his once-again-lifeless, tiny, body is cradled in her arms for a second time.

She takes him with her when she climbs into bed again, holds him tight to her as she tries to ignore the way the mattress is still uncomfortably tilted towards her head from a mass underneath it and the way she’s sleeping in Brutor’s and Brock’s blood, and the weight of a disappointed Zolf right next to her, and the smell of Hamid lingering on the breeze.

When she wakes, the room is clean and as sparse as she remembers it being before. 

Despite the coming on of winter, she will not permit a fire to be lit in the house for many, many months. 


End file.
